What Is Analytics?

Analytics is a broad term that can describe a wide variety of concepts and techniques. In this article, we will be focusing on online analytics where the word ‘online’ refers to the Internet.

Online analytics entails using analytical tools and techniques to collect data about Internet-related behavior and performance from users across the web. This article in particular looks at analytics in SEO, why it is important, and how it can positively impact your website’s rankings.

What is Analytics?

Analytics is a generic term that encompasses a range of statistical techniques used to collect data on Internet-related behavior as well as measuring performance.

The analytics process for a website generally includes a process of automation, contributing to the creation of a big data set:

1. Setting up on-page infrastructure that collects real-time raw data of on-page user behavior
2. Storing this raw data in a data warehouse (depending on the size of the dataset)
3. Taking that unstructured data and running it through analytics software so data scientists can run different types of diagnostic tests on the data using different analytics tools. Such tests might include descriptive analytics, predictive analytics, prescriptive analytics.
4. Applying data visualization techniques to the now analyzed data for efficient conclusion drawing, SEO reporting, informed decision-making, and seeing the understandable metrics of what is going on with a website.

Why is Analytics Important?

Organizations all over the world use analytics to understand their audience, their success, track SEO performance and understand what they need to do better.

Analytics are fundamental to creating a high-performing, profitable website. In order to optimize a website for performance, and thus achieve high rankings in search engine results page algorithms, web admins need to know how visitors to their website interact with the site itself.

This means collecting data, or data mining, to create large data sets which are then analyzed and used to make informed business decisions regarding the development and improvement of a website.

Data analysts in SEO use analytics and data points for a vast array of essential functions. These include:

• Identifying meaningful patterns between website users by analyzing historical data. This insight then helps digital marketers and website owners understand potential future outcomes, particularly beneficial for e-commerce site owners.
• Creating an analytics solution for forecasting website traffic, conversion rates, and revenue. This knowledge can then be used in predictive modeling, particularly when looking to sell a website and predict future business performance and profitability.
• Using advanced analytics for informed decision-making. This offers businesses a chance for supply chain optimization, which can inform better decisions about stock and budget allocation, saving overheads in the long run.
• Importantly, noticing analytics spam and blocking the cause of such problems.

This business data offers insight into website functionality and performance, which in turn helps answer questions such as:

• How well does my website perform?
• How many unique visitors did it receive in a given month?
• What is the bounce rate and what can we do to reduce it?
• Which keywords are important for my website and how much revenue are they driving?
• What is the average order value (AOV) for my e-commerce site?
• What pages should I be improving if I want to drive more organic search traffic?
• Where are my visitors coming from, and where should I advertise more?

Analytics FAQ

What is Google Analytics?

Google Analytics is a web analytics service provided by Google that tracks and reports website traffic, including demographic data and which pages are viewed most often. The information generated by Google Analytics can be extremely valuable in helping you to understand which factors make up the success of a website, or which aspects are lagging behind.

How does Google Analytics help with SEO?

Google Analytics helps with SEO because it tracks everything about the behavior on your website. This includes:

• Whether or not users are likely to be interested in a certain word
• Which keywords they’ve been searching for
• The pages they’ve visited and which websites they read or ‘like’ most often

The data generated by Google Analytics helps you to understand what interests your visitors, insight which you can then leverage to create a website that is better at giving your users more of what they want.

This is crucial because SEO is the process of creating a highly valuable, beneficial, useful website that gives your target audience exactly what they are looking for.

What is an SEO analyst?

Put simply, an SEO analyst analyzes data relating to SEO. Using a range of analytical tools, they are able to understand what factors makeup success in online marketing and apply this knowledge to their work.

SEO analysts use Google Analytics extensively, as this is where quite a lot of data is collected for them to analyze. Analysts might also use other tools such as Google’s free Keyword Tool or SEMRush (for analyzing the advertising strategies of your competitors).

What is SEO data?

There are literally thousands of variables that can be returned by analytical tools, each of which is an element that makes up a website’s SEO.

SEO data is any data point that measures what people do on your website, how your website is perceived by others, and how your website performs in SERPs (search engine results pages).

Marketers can then run statistical analysis on such data, to create a better website customer experience and also look in-depth at their website’s SEO KPIs.

Summary

Hopefully, this article has given you a better understanding of analytics. Analytics is vital to SEO and website performance, as they help visualize your website user’s behavior, which in turn helps create predictive models and use diagnostic analytics to create a better-performing website.

To learn more about our analytics and SEO services, take a look at our SEO packages today.